What are fats and the different kinds…..
Fats, or lipids, as they’re called, are organic substances that cannot dissolve in water.
fatty acids
saturated fats
monounsaturated fats
polyunsaturated fats. Within this final category, we’ll look at essential fats, which are the healing fats and hydrogenated and trans fats, which are the killer fats.
Phospholipds or lipids are another word for ‘fats' found in the cell membranes. They come in different shapes and sizes, and those fatty acid molecules are the building blocks of our fats and oils both in your food and in your body. Fatty acid chains can vary in length. Chemists have assigned numbers to the carbons in the fatty acid chain. This numbering system is called The Omega System that will be discussed later.
Every single living cell in our body requires fatty acids for construction and maintenance. All types of fat are needed by the body including saturated fat, monounsaturated fat, and polyunsaturated fat.
In general...
Fats store and carry nutrients around the body.
• They provide physical insulation for our body’s organs.
• Fats help maintain body temperatures
• They play myriad roles in metabolism
Saturated fats are found mostly in animal fats and tropical oils — oils like coconut oil and palm oil. Saturated fats are solid/hard at room temperature.
A lot of people think all saturated fats are bad for our health but let's consider these facts:
All saturated fats produce energy.
They provide the building blocks for your hormones.
Saturated fats slow down the absorption of your meals so you can go longer without feeling hungry and maintain your even blood sugar — one of the core basics of our health.
Saturated fats are carriers and contain the necessary fat-soluble vitamins.
Those include vitamin A, vitamin D, vitamin E, and vitamin K.
Saturated fat helps convert carotenes to vitamin A. This is a difficult conversion for several categories of people including children, the elderly, and those with thyroid disorders.
The short chain saturated fats are easy to digest and people with liver and digestive disorders benefit from inclusion of them in their diet.
The short chain saturated fats help feed friendly bacteria in our colon.
The medium chain saturated fats help to inhibit the growth of yeasts like Candida.
The medium chain saturated fats are not stored as fat in the body. They actually create thermogenesis, or heat, in the body and boost metabolism.
The medium chain saturated fats also boost your immunity. Lauric acid is is present in breast milk and in coconut oil. It’s one of the great immune boosters. Butter and ghee are also medium chain. The medium chain saturated fats are needed for proper utilization of the essential fatty acids. They work synergistically. Even the heart (supposedly hurt by the inclusion of saturated fats in the diet), thrives on reserves of saturated fat in times of stress.
What is important to point out here is that no fat in nature is 100% saturated. Every fat occurring in nature has a mixture of saturated and unsaturated fats. Every molecule, every fatty acid has a mixture of saturated and unsaturated fats. So extreme variation causes further confusion as the classifications are not so simple.
Lets look at beef fat. This is usually thrown in the bucket of saturated fat. Actually, its fat content is typically less than half saturated (which will vary depending on the diet of the cow and why grass fed matters). Of the relative half that is not saturated, much of it is oleic acid. Oleic acid is the same fat that we revere in olive oil. In fact, olive oil contains 13.5% saturated fat to its 74% monounsaturated and 8% polyunsaturated fat. Each food doesn’t fall just into one of these categories. All fat isn’t just one kind of fat.
Key Tip: The more hard fats we eat the more of the healing fats, the essential fatty acids, we need to consume.
If we optimize our intake of essential fats, we can use saturated fats in moderation without fear.
Source your saturated fats. Fat is a carrier for toxins. It stores them. So when choosing your good fats, you want to choose wisely. For instance, if you eat butter, ideally use raw and/or organic butter or cultured butter from grass fed cows over processed butter from commercially fed cows.
The Action Step is don’t be scared of good healthy naturally occurring saturated fats.
Monounsaturated fatty acids keep arteries supple and skin healthy. They are also important heart protectors, as we know from the principles of the Mediterranean diet and their consumption of olive oil. Nuts and seeds are a great way to get the monounsaturated oils into your diet, as long as you tolerate them.
Canola oil is mostly monounsaturated. It’s predominantly made from the seed of genetically modified rape plants. It’s high proportion of a heart unhealthy monounsaturated fat called erucic acid. The erucic acid has been tied to heart lesions and it’s high concentration required that the oil go through some genetic modification to reduce that potential risk.
Monounsaturated fats are liquid at room temperature, or “oils” and solid when refrigerated.
Monounsaturated fats are found in
olive oil
olives
sesame oil
certain nuts (like macadamias, pecans, Brazil nuts, almonds, cashews, pistachios, hazelnuts)
certain legumes such as peanuts and soybeans
avocados
canola oil
Action Step: Eat more monounsaturated fats found in olive oil and try to eat it in its raw state.
Polyunsaturated fats include the extremely important essential fats or essential fatty acids. These fats are defined as essential for several important reasons:
They are essential because the body cannot make them.
They are required for normal cell, tissue, gland, and organ function.
They must be provided from outside the body through food or supplements.
They come only from fats. Their absence from the diet will eventually lead to disease. Inclusion of essential fatty acids to a deficient diet often reverses the symptoms of deficiency and results in a return to health.
What are these polyunsaturated fats in our food sources? Where do we get them from? We get these essential Omega 3 fatty acids from...
Flax, hemp, pumpkin or walnut are not for heating. They are extremely healthy for you. But, these polyunsaturated oils are not meant to be heated. It’s the heat that alters their structure and makes them unhealthy.
Key Point: "It is more important for health to optimize the consumption of essential fats than it is to avoid the ‘bad fats.’ The fats that heal protect us from the fats that kill. If you removed all the bad fats from your diet and did not bring in the good ones, you would still die from degenerative disease because you cannot live without the good essential fats.” Udo Erasmus, the PhD nutritionist and the author of the book, Fats That Heal, Fats That Kill
They're critical for the proper function of all the cells in your body helping to keep the cell membranes supple and stretchy. Your healthy cell membranes impact the rate at which you age, repair from tissue damage, handle inflammation, and even metabolize your food.
Deficiencies in Omega-3 fatty acids can include weakness, motoring coordination, vision impairment, difficulties learning, behavioral changes, mental deterioration, immune dysfunction, high blood pressure, high triglycerides which contribute to the risk of heart disease, and tissue inflammation. In fact, most states of inflammation can be linked to deficiencies in Omega-3 fatty acids. Anything ending in ‘itis’ is a state of inflammation.
The Omega 6’s can be found in nuts, seeds, and the oils of nuts and seeds — so sunflower, safflower, canola oils. Deficiencies of Omega 6 can be seen as, loss of hair, behavioral disturbances, kidney degeneration, failure of wounds to heal, sterility and miscarriage, arthritis and circulatory problems.
*For good health we must have a balance of Omega 3's and Omega 6's.
A big problem in America is that the Omega-3 consumption has decreased immensely in our food supply over the last century or so. Meanwhile, our Omega-6 consumption has increased immensely in our food supply.
A lot of the disease that we’re experiencing is because these healing fats are disproportionate to where we need them to be.
The ideal ratio for health and longevity is about 1:1 or even 1:2.5. The way the numbers are typically listed is first Omega-6 and then Omega-3. So that’s Omega 6:Omega 3, favoring the Omega 3s.
The standard American diet is anywhere from 12:1 to 40:1. This is considered chronic inflammation. This would be things like diabetes, autoimmune disorders, high blood pressure, and even autism, ADD/ADHD, eczema, repeat exposure to food sensitivities, asthma, even anger and hyperactivity. Those are all inflammatory conditions. In the case of chronic inflammation, the body doesn’t go into an immediate response but instead keeps the body in a persistent state of repair reaction. The body’s regular immunity is compromised because the immune system is distracted by its job of tending to the incessant and unwaning inflammation.The long-term effects of chronic inflammation have been linked to heart disease.
Omega-6 fatty acids eicosanoids are pro-inflammatory and Omega-3 fatty acids eicosanoids are anti-inflammatory. When the 6’s far outweigh the 3’s, we cannot control or regulate our inflammatory response. This is a system that the body should naturally be able to keep in check but we have thrown it off generation by generation with our diet.
Where did the omega-3s in our diet go? Firstly, grains are higher in Omega-6 fatty acid. Greens are higher in Omega-3 fatty acid. With that in mind, consider what our commercial animals eat. Grains. Primarily genetically modified corn. And consider what they used to eat. Greens.
It’s important to note that when we look at studies that consider meat vs. non-meat based diets and their impact on health, that the meat in consideration is likely this factory-farmed, GMO grain-fed meat. The factory-farmed animals that we tend to consume today as well as their derivative foods (eggs, dairy, butter), lost a potent portion of their Omega-3 content based on what they were fed. This is why you may have heard that eating grass fed, free range, is better for your health.
Trans fats
After the 1920’s oil crops were planted, pesticides came into use, and factories were built. Technologies for seed preparation, oil extraction, refining, bleaching, deodorization were developed. This allowed for more oils to be available to us, but not without a cost.
Vital vitamins and nutrients like carotene, vitamin E and lecithin were removed from the oil to keep it from spoiling since it needed to sustain a longer shelf life.
The natural flavor from the seeds came to be thought of as a bad thing.
Oils were now supposed to be tasteless and with that tastelessness came a devitalization; the health benefits had been removed, altered or destroyed. Sally Fallon in her book, Nourishing Traditions, makes a convincing case that this is the cause of the rise of coronary heart disease — helping us to see that the consumption of these altered fats plays a big role in the increases in heart disease and chronic illnesses. In addition, seed varieties of soy and rapeseed for canola are chosen for their lower Omega-3 content to extend their shelf life and make them easier to heat at high temperatures as well as to hydrogenate.
Your Action Step: Consider eliminating seed oils from your diet
They are low in Omega-3’s and our over consumption of those high Omega-6 oils — they’re in everything because of their shelf life, contributing to the alteration of that Omega 6 to Omega 3 ratio.
Damage caused by these trans fats:
Trans fats are artificially manufactured so the body can’t get rid of them. They make the blood hard and sticky. They are known to cause heart disease because of this stickiness.
They increase triglyceride levels which can cause thickening of the walls of the artery and that is what leads to heart disease — those high triglycerides. Trans fat and sugar are the big culprits here.
Trans fats increase inflammation in the body. Inflammation is now known to play a key role in the formation of fatty blockages in heart blood vessels.
Trans fats increase our risk for Type 2 diabetes and, therefore, obesity. They interfere with enzyme structure in the body that helps to eliminate certain toxins. So consumption of trans fats increases our body’s toxic load.
Trans fats interfere with the function of the cell wall, which should be made up of essential fats so things can easily pass in and out.
Trans fats disrupt our hormone synthesis, our metabolism, our immunity, and our tissue repair.
They are addictive. They actually tap into the brain’s reward system. But the effects on the brain go deeper than that because the trans fatty acids in the brain alter the ability of neurons to communicate. They may cause neural degeneration and compromise mental performance and acuity.
